Andre Ethier recently said that he felt he was seeing better pitches with Manny Ramirez batting behind him….To test this, I looked at the Pitch F/X data for Ethier from 3/31 to 8/27, when he was not hitting ahead of Manny, and compared it to the data from 8/28 until the end of the season, when Manny was protecting him….He saw virtually the same amount of fastballs and same percentage of pitches in a pretty generous strike zone before hitting in front of Manny and after. It might seem like he is seeing better pitches but it could be some type of placebo effect.